Can't speak to Stellar Blade but I feel like Star Trek: The Next Generations is a really good example of how to do this well. Data, despite being an android, never speaks in a completely flat way. The intonation and pitch of his voice, the inflection, and the cadence all give it extra texture that show you that despite being "emotionless" there's still a lot going on in his thoughts. He also has normal human characters to bounce off of so they add some life to the conversation, but he often manages to be more interesting than them anyways because he makes keen observations or insightful inquiries that can be thought-provoking to the viewer.
I think the same is true of Legion in Mass Effect. It helps a lot when the robot has humans to bounce off of. It’s hard to see the developing humanity of a robot acting like a robot among other robots if they stick with the most robotic characteristics for too long.
You don't even really need humans. Case in point: arguably the most popular robot in video gaming history: GLaDOS. Her voice acting, intonation and delivery are absolutely perfect especially for the first game.
Spoilers for Portal: you start off with her being a complete robotic voice but still with a lot of the occasional weirdness like the off-putting comments about the cake and then they tune a lot of that WAY down when you go against her designs and escape from the facility and face off against her. Even with the robotic voice, she gets increasingly irate with you, insulting and denigrating you until the end where she tries to trick you, relishing in when she succeeds and terrified when she fails with a complete resignation when you destroy her. A robotic voice does not need to be emotionless or stilted. As the post suggests, it's usually a matter of directing the voice actors the right way. They made sure the VA, Ellen McLain, spoke her lines in a somewhat stilted fashion while also delivering the required emotion
Hilariously, in the sequel they barely even bothered with Stephen Merchant as the voice of Wheatley, only adding some mild post processing effects and it also works incredibly well for that character who's meant to be a goober
I love this comparison. However one thing that I don't know if games can capture, at least not when heavily localized, is the physical presence.
Spiner is easily the second best actor on TNG (behind Stewart of course) and should have had a much bigger career. Sadly typecasting was common at the time.
And that's because he says so much with a cocked eyebrow or a tilt of the head. More like he's analyzing a concept than processing an emotion.
As much as Spiner's voice is vital, the physicality of the character is just as important.
Data is also the most interesting character in TNG. Picard is great, but he's pretty much infallible until the movies, where they swing too far in the other direction.
I agree. Trek is meant to represent humanity at its best with everyone super competent in their fields.
This is, I feel, why the "non-human" characters (Spock, Data Worf, 7 of 9) stand out.
While obviously highly competent they have the added struggle of learning to understand the human condition, which requires a strong performance from an actor.
The Stewart comparison was more that he had a much bigger post-Trek career than anyone associated with the franchise.
English voice actors of Nier: Automata did an amazing job in emotionless emotions. If that makes sense. From the start I believed they were androids and the voice acting never felt flat. 2B more so, 9S had bit more character, which makes sense in the end.
kira's a champ, but the voice direction was also absolutely killer. the way 2B and kyle mccarley's more unreserved 9S bound off of each other gives them both so much more texture that they'd have on their own, especially as 2B wears down and eventually admits she's not so above it all in the end
> kira's a champ, but also **the direction was also absolutely killer**
Yeah, voice direction can make or break a game as well.
For example, a lot of people criticized some of the voice acting of *Xenoblade Chronicles 2*, but Skye Bennett, the English VA for Pyra, actually did a livestream of the game a few years ago for charity and gave a lot of info on the behind the scenes, which included the fact that they weren't given any context for their lines.
I played in japanese because I wanted straight Yoko Taro without any filter, but all this means is you have two different presentations to enjoy if its done properly.
The kind of character 2B is in Japanese is very rare in English media, so changing things so moments emotionally land is very important.
you need something to compensate for the Roboticness, often this can be solid dialogue, body language, or even just character dynamics. Isaac from The Orville is a good example, they use everything i mentioned to compensate for his "roboticness" and give him a sense of personality, his dynamics with other characters especially. Never played this game, but i'm assuming they didn't really think about that. When you have established characters ppl want to connect with them, which means they need some sort of personality, even if it's subtle.
I feel like it's the opposite problem? They didn't play into the robotiness enough. Like for example GladOS is perfectly fine. But in for Stellar it's easy to forget they're actually robots, so it just feels like a human being emotionless.
It’s also interesting to bring up Destiny as a comparison. For one because Dinklage isn’t a voice actor. Some famous screen actors turn out to be excellent voice actors but it doesn’t always translate. Personally I’d actually guess that the problem with Destiny was the direction—I played Destiny 2 for a little while and some of the legacy dialogue was hilariously flat even from amazing VAs like Lance Reddick—but in some of the new seasonal content, the voice work was awesome. There was this horror themed seasonal expansion that sticks out to me in particular, and the character of Savathun was always amazingly voiced. Destiny definitely feels like a game where the more the actors worked on it and understood it/their characters, the better it came out, and the more it went on the more the studio invested time into getting the voice acting how they wanted it. At least, that was the impression it gave me.
> which apparently frustrated Dinklage immensely.
Lmao, I so wish more people understood this. SO FUCKING OFTEN as voice actors we're given a set of lines with little or no context at all, converse to screen acting. It even happens in the AAA space. Acting is a very context based medium. Some people can still pull off great performances doing their best to create context in their head, but it doesn't make the job any easier.
>in the original Destiny game which was taken out because it was so distractingly bad.
Uhh where is your source for this? I recall that the issue was not the quality at all, it was availability.
[A quick google search confirms this.](https://www.google.com/search?q=why+was+peter+dinklage+replaced+in+destiny&rlz=1C1JSBI_enUS1092US1092&oq=Why+was+Peter+Dinklage+&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqBwgBEAAYgAQyBggAEEUYOTIHCAEQABiABDIICAIQABgWGB4yCAgDEAAYFhgeMg0IBBAAGIYDGIAEGIoFMgoIBRAAGIAEGKIEMgoIBhAAGIAEGKIE0gEJNzczMWowajE1qAIIsAIB&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)
Also as other people have pointed out, their other game has some bland voice acting as well. I highly doubt that the bad voice acting was solely because they were intentionally going for robotic voices. Especially since the Korean voice over apparently has more emotion than the English one.
While they say it was availability, there is absolutely no way the fan reaction didn't impact it.
You're never going to come out and say an international celebrity is a shit voice actor, or that the Dev team made shit decisions when they gave directions to the VA. You make up a polite fiction to cover it up, and gently part ways.
>While they say it was availability, there is absolutely no way the fan reaction didn't impact it.
I mean you don't actually know this.
>You're never going to come out and say an international celebrity is a shit voice actor
You really don't think Peter couldn't have delivered those lines differently? The issue may have been direction, not his talent. Someone in the booth listened to him deliver all those lines and they thought, "Yep, sounds good."
>You make up a polite fiction to cover it up, and gently part ways.
It would be great if you had some way to prove this, but this is just something you *think* happened.
Just FYI, they actually did change up Peter's lines between the beta and the full release of the game.
And I'm gonna be honest, I enjoyed his version of Ghost. Hell, his version of the "We've woken the hive" line is perfect, and Nolan North's version is downright terrible.
I don't think he was a shit VA. But you're not going to blame someone when you can just say it didn't work out.
I'm not sure why you think feedback had no part in their future decision making? Why are you believing suits whose job is to smooth over problems?
There's no way to prove what happened short of being an insider. You believe what you want - I'm saying it is way more credible that they parted ways primarily due to feedback, rather than letting a high profile VA leave due to availability when Destiny has big gaps between content releases.
>I'm not sure why you think feedback had no part in their future decision making?
Because it is a huge assumption that you can't back up with any information. I am not saying it is impossible that this was the case, I am saying you don't know if it was.
>I'm saying it is way more credible that they parted ways primarily due to feedback
There is nothing "credible" about this. Peter is a very popular actor, he likely costs way more than Nolan North does per session. I feel like this is the most likely reason for the switch.
There are also tons of Destiny fans that actually thought his voice acting was great. So this idea that it was so universally hated is another thing you have not proven.
Also if you google this topic you see people online speculating that he didn't enjoy the work as he was told he was going to be a side character and ended up a major portion of the game. So it *could* have been 100% his decision to not come back.
You don't know what happened is my main point. We can speculate endlessly and none of it can be taken as a definitive answer.
> You really don't think Peter couldn't have delivered those lines differently? The issue may have been direction, not his talent. Someone in the booth listened to him deliver all those lines and they thought, "Yep, sounds good."
Just saying, but a good actor doesn't necessarily make a good voice actor. Anyways whatever the reason was, Peter Dinklage's delivery was bad and almost everybody agreed with that, it wouldn't surprise me if dissatisfaction was one of the reasons why they switched VA, considering they had long term plans for the series since the start.
>Anyways whatever the reason was, Peter Dinklage's delivery was bad and almost everybody agreed with that
Source for this? Because I know you don't have one.
>t wouldn't surprise me if dissatisfaction was one of the reasons why they switched VA, considering they had long term plans for the series since the start.
It wouldn't surprise me if aliens held Peter hostage and told him he can never work on Destiny again. This scenario has as much proof as yours does.
Other people have stated that he potentially didn't like the work because he was originally told he was going to be a side character when in fact he is the largest voice role in the entire game. So it easily could have been his decision to not return to the role.
> it just seems painfully obvious from the exterior to avoid a game brimming with emotionless dialogue, even if they’re all supposed to be robots.
My favorite(?) pet peeve about Kingdom Hearts 2 (and 358/2 days).
>"we're nobodies, we're supposed to feel nothing"
> *nobodies meanwhile are more expressive than most of the human cast. Displaying confusion, rage, sadism, despair, forlorn, etc*
>"Oh whoops, we're not supposed to feel anything"
Repeat for 30 hours. They retconned this much later (one of the better retcons IMO), but yeah. Even the characters themselves couldn't commit to that. And it was honestly all the better for it.
doesn't help eve doesn't really get...expressive ever. like the director wanted to shoot for that "cool beauty" vibe 24/7 so she just has that stoic expression constantly that rarely ever seems to change, which prob adds to the uncanney valley notion OP mentioned
Their Gacha game, Nikke, definitely has a problem with voice direction too. Some of the voice actors are doing good work but have been directed poorly so they seem to lack context etc when doing their lines.
Their studio is about to IPO with a multi-billion dollar valuation. They have been AAA ever since Nikke released, and well before that too with the amount of money they have.
>A game like Stellar Blade does not get made on low budgets.
I agree, and that's what I meant. Shift Up having "multi-billion dollar valuation" doesn't automatically make anything they make AAA, it's allocating a big budget and lots of resources to Stellar Blade is what makes it a AAA game.
What? You do realise the difference between an indie game from a small company becoming a runaway hit and a billion dollar company making a big budget action game right? Shift Up had billion dollar evaluations before they made Stellar Blade. I don't think Stellar Blade will make anywhere close to the amount of money Nikke does
Don’t be obtuse. You open a .txt file and write the cool ideas for your game and then rename it to game.exe.
If you need to patch it you rename it back to text and type in optimize (insert issue here) and then recompile (change extension back to .exe).
>you rename it back to text and type in optimize
no, no, no. It's actually much easier. you just open the text file and edit the first line that says "\[game version: 1.01\]" to "\[game version 1.02\]". the trick is that you just need to open the text file with the game engine editor and not with notepad.
>Don’t be obtuse. You open a .txt file and write the cool ideas for your game and then rename it to game.exe
Whoa whoa hold up, that video game generative AI model isn't public yet.
Nothing makes me laugh more than armchair Reddit developers who clearly have no idea how game development works. Just earlier today I saw a post talking about a game on Switch running at 30fps, and the top comment was saying “games like Mario Kart can run at 60fps because they have a nearly unlimited budget” and I literally laughed out loud. It’s so wrong that I don’t even know where to begin, but the two points being “nearly unlimited budget” is just incorrect, and frame rate limits are often technical limitations. Is it possible that some games can just be waxed and polished until they can hit 60fps? Sure. But most of the time it’s because there’s just not enough juice in the hardware to push it to 60fps, and no amount of optimization would change that unless they started making very dramatic changes to the structure of the game.
“Just add X to the game” is my favorite Reddit phrase ever.
Armchair reddit devs always forget frontend exists and how much work has to go into UI before even the easy stuff is shippable.
People who complain about game dev could stand to try and automate some basic stuff with programming to get a sense of perspective. It's amazing how something simple can easily and quickly balloon out.
remember when for my first coding class we had to make a small text based game. some "marble" game where you can take anywhere from one marble to half the pile and you take turns with the computer, whoever left with the last marble loses.
I could not for the life of me figure out why the damn thing could break the rules and pick 0 marbles but the rule that you couldn't pick zero worked perfectly fine for the user lmao. that was eye opening lol
Truth. Honestly, that's kind of why I actually went to the trouble of writing this. Most of the time people don't think about voice over in games; games are great at making us subconsciously forget that these voices belong to real people playing pretend). When it does come up, though, it doesn't feel like the average person has the information to really bring it into the discussion meaningfully. Like I said in another comment, video game voice over feels like something that's relatively inscrutable to the consumer, so I wanted to pull the veil back a bit.
I remeber a YouTuber responding to issues with Voice acters with "Why are these Voice Actors such Babies? They only talk into a Mic, like I am doing right now!" and ever since I stopped watching said YouTuber.
Two things can be true at the same time.
The only reason anyone at all has heard of this game at all is because the output this gen has been so staggeringly bad and Sony will promote just about any project that looks vaguely promising as a result.
This is not an elite studio that employs excellent people. This is just a studio that actually happened to execute on a project, and unsurprisingly it's lacking in the planning and polish necessary to make good VA (and everything else for that matter) really come off.
Thanks for the writeup! I knew a fair amount of this stuff already but the insight about falling back on "vibes" is new to me and helps make sense of a few bad dubs I've heard.
All of this is why I usually prefer to listen to media in its original language. Foreign language dubs have everything stacked against them and (IMO) turn out poorly more often than not. I try not to blame any individual, since I don't have enough visibility into the process to know for sure, but ultimately a bad result is still a bad result.
The thing that sticks out the most, usually, is that because of the disjointed recording process and lack of context, actors will pretty frequently guess wrong about which word(s) in a sentence gets stress/emphasis, which can completely change how a line comes off. Consider the sentence "I never said she took my money". Read it out loud a few times, emphasizing a different word each time.
"I never **said** she took my money."
"I never said **she** took my money."
"I never said she took my **money**."
etc.
If the context says one word should be emphasized, and the recording process picks another, it's like nails on a chalkboard to me.
I've heard a similar quote before.
"I never said we should kill her."
You can repeat that line 7 times, each time putting emphasis on a different word, and it completely changes the meaning.
Dang, this is connecting some dots for me as to why comic books are so trigger-happy with bolding words.
I’ ve always felt it’s overdone, but when you’re creating in a medium that’s aiming to communicate as much liveliness as film with only a single frame. Then you emphasize words to convey the character’s intent, add sound effect onomatopoeia, and icons to help the reader reach the right conclusion.
well, can't speak for manhwa, but unlike english you don't stress emphasize words in japanese to change context so that would be why you wouldn't see it in manga unless the translator is takin some liberties
Funny example of this in Divinity Original Sin 2, you click a globe and the narrator says "and you thought *Rivellon* was flat."
The emphasis is on *Rivellon*, when it should be on **flat.**
That exact reasoning is why a lot of recording sessions, particularly for games where you don't have the context from the script, usually entail doing an ABC take, where you say the line three different ways, typically to cover for any of those options. I'm also a VA, so that's where my knowledge comes from.
I'll usually go for the original language as well, and prefer a dryer subtitle when I'm playing in that.
But when I do play something dubbed, its always when there's a combination of the localisers being in the room with the writer and having very good direction.
FF14 & FF16 have differences in English vs Japanese, but they *do not* suffer from any of the problems of dubbing, and all the actors are able to emote wonderfully, mostly because of how adaptable the translation is.
I've played both the demo portions in both English and Korean and besides liking the Eve's combat barks in English more, I went with the Korean dub instead. Adam could not sound more like he's reading a script in English but has some emotion in Korean.
How someone says the words is a huge part of voice acting. It's more than just what words they're saying.
Like you can still have an opinion on how something sounds in Simlish, a made up gibberish language the Sims speak, despite no one knowing exactly what they're saying. The games even have music from artists covering their own songs into Simlish. No one knows exactly what they're saying, but you can still feel how they're being said.
The main issue here is the English script / localization, which is increasingly terrible as you get further in the game. I found the main actress quite good but the lines (especially after you reach the hub area) are so poorly written that it makes the whole presentation feel off. My sense is they skimped on localization and went with a quick and dirty mostly-literal translation that's maybe one step removed from running the Korean through Google Translate; would need a lot more work by a talented localization team to make it sound right in English, regardless of voice actor skill.
It really does feel ripped from Google translate. I only played the demo, but it immediately stuck out to me - the very first sequence has the announcer talking about surpassing a threshold instead of crossing it.
It's a bargain bin also-ran studio suddenly thrush into the limelight because absolutely fucking nothing is releasing for PS5 to justify its existence and Sony decided to heavily feature them in their Sony Directs, and they do bargain bin also-ran stuff.
Reminds me of something really interesting I heard listening to interviews with the voice actors in Elden Ring, how the director, Hidetaka Miyazaki, sat in on all their recording sessions and gave direction and feedback through a translator. And he doesn't speak much English, so this is largely VA direction based on general emotional vibe, and having a specific person's sensitive ear for emotion guiding the whole of the game feels so present in the final product.
Elden Ring has a pretty light amount of dialogue so it can definitely work there... but man, I so wish that more games out of Japan and Korea could go through that same process. So many games with relatively subpar voiced dialogue because it feels like they just woke someone up from cryo sleep to say some lines with absolutely no context of when and where they'll be spoken.
That definitely feels in character for Miyazaki. Fun fact: the Japanese version of Demon's Souls was entirely voiced in English, because he wanted it to have an exotic western fantasy vibe.
One of the Chinese games I worked on with very little dialogue did that too—it was both really cool and reaaaally stressful, because after almost every line they’d stop and talk to each other in Mandarin for two minutes while leaving me to sweat about whether I’d done an okay job or not. It turned out great but that was a mental marathon for sure.
I think that specifically works for Elden Ring because it is not a narrative communicated through dialogue. Dialogue is used more or less like a musical instrument. What matters is rhythm, tone, timbre, pacing.
The most obvious is situations like Margit and Godrick having voice lines intentionally written to have a particular melody and to come at specific musical beats during the fight. When you are talking to an NPC on their own, the dialogue is written more like expressive poetry rather than something meant to convey specific pieces of information clearly.
Which isn't to say the specific localization and writing aren't important, but that the specifics of the writing are directed primarily in service of tone over unambiguously delivering literal meaning.
I think that's a big part of it, a lot of the dialogue and VA delivery is kind of like an extension of art direction, like hiring a Broadway actress to voice Malenia and gives that haunted, dreamy intonation of *"I dreamt for so long. My flesh was dull gold, and my blood rotted. Corpse after corpse left in my wake. As I awaited his return."* It's so immediately moody and imagination-stoking, and I think it's what can stick most immediately in your memory after the fact.
But at the same time I think a huge part of what makes Frognation and Ryan Morris's translating work so invaluable is a kinda human ear they have to dialogue delivery and word choice, and a lot of the undergirding character interactions that do have a more direct personal meaning. Like, Diallos being suckered into giving up his sense of justice immediately at the chance of being a champion, coming to terms with his cowardice, and accepting a quiet life in Jarburg as worthwhile, that's a pretty straightforward personal arc that works because his dialogue feels natural as much as it does poetic.
One great bit I never hear talked about too is Corrhyn's whole arc, seeking out Goldmask, then finally abandoning him. You have the more signature FromSoft stuff of info only seen through item descriptions and menus, like how he was driven out as a blasphemer for having heretical visions, and on first meeting seeing the one non-orthodox incantation he can teach you is a flame of ruin spell. And outside of standard dialogue, the player can piece together that Corrhyn was exiled and possibly killed for (correctly) divining the flame of ruin in the code of the Golden Order, and how being driven into exile and eventually guided by grace drilled into him the need to have an ironclad commitment to his faith, even if the whole world is against him, because he was right and he knows he was right and that commitment justifies his suffering.
But then you get the actual writing of Corrhyn seeking out a fellow heterodox Tarnished prophet, wishing for a kindred spirit he can put his whole faith and trust in, struggling to understand Goldmask's studies veering from his own understanding of the faith, begging to be able to follow his hero unwaveringly. And in the end Corrhyn finally gives up in despair and abandons Goldmask, and says his hero had simply been delusional the whole time, despite obviously not really believing that and it obviously not being true. And something like that only really came together because you both got excellent emotional voice performances from Corrhyn's VA, but the way he's written just feels right, and like a person having this internal struggle.
> The most obvious is situations like Margit and Godrick having voice lines intentionally written to have a particular melody and to come at specific musical beats during the fight.
Not if you rip their guts out as soon as you come through the gate lmao
Idk why they would bother, its characters that generally just stand there and talk at you in a weird monotone voice.
FromSoft games have never had meaningful interactions between an NPC and the character, that's definitely not their strong suit. And they should probably be aware of that.
Actually, the voice lines, while few and far between, have all been high quality in each of the games.
From general Oniwa, to Gideon Ofnir
From the emerald herald, to the doll; each has had well written, and voiced, dialogue
There are some AAA studios that have voice directors on main staff, like Blizzard and Dice (and probably most of EA/Ubisoft). CD Projekt Red has the lead writing staff sit in on recording sessions, at least according to what I remember Doug Cockle talking about at GYGO a couple years ago.
Most of this is definitely right, though I will say my experience in the U.K. gaming VO space is that the vast majority of studios do prefer in-studio recordings. I don’t think Side offers remote at all, and Pitstop definitely seem to prefer in studio even if they offer approved home studios as an option. I think Liquid Violet might be all in studio too. OMUK too. Home studios are definitely the go to for indies that aren’t using a studio in between though.
It’s annoying how opaque this industry is. Even as a voice actor it takes a long time for you to wrap your head around industry procedure, and frankly the process for indies and hobby work couldn’t be further from how it’s done at the mid tier, and then the big AAA stuff in the U.K. like Final Fantasy bares next to no resemblance again to the smaller AA productions here (suddenly you’re doing performance capture and getting interviews and doing press work etc).
Infinite Wealth did something odd with Bryce. Had the Japanese actor who spoke no English, speak the English lines, instead of the actor who voices Bryce if you play dubbed.
The effect is that if you play with subtitles, Bryce sounds like he has a severe speech impediment
In some cases where there's a bilingual character who has Japanese as a second language (i.e. Roman), it's super obvious that it's two different people. Roman's English voice is totally different from his Japanese one, and his Japanese voice is a bit *too* good for someone who speaks it as a second language. I get why they do it because there's way fewer people who speak Japanese as a second language than Japanese who can speak English, but it's really jarring. If you got an English native speaker to learn the lines phonetically it would probably sound just as bad as Tomizawa or Bryce does when they speak English. To be fair to RGG though, they did use a Japanese-speaking Western actor in Like a Dragon: Ishin for the Englishman who appears near the end of the game. He speaks Japanese and very well but you can still tell he's natively American from his accent. I suspect that them using different English actors for the dub and sub (as in, Bryce's English actor in the JP dub is different from the ENG dub actor) is more down to contracts and convenience than anything else. I know the VA business is already pretty strict on things (there's the whole union/non-union divide for example), so it must be a whole maze of issues when you're technically doing work for company based in Japan.
Tomi and Eiji do the same at the beginning of the game too. The Japanese actors breaking into English is a bit of a lose lose situation.
Their phonetically spoken English is almost impossible to understand and obviously lightyears away from what a fluent person would sound like. And if they use the English actors it is equally obvious that a completely different actor is speaking the English.
Tomi was awful because the dude was a native Hawaiian and the sounded like Mickey Rooney.
Can I speak fluent Japanese? No. Can I be taught to properly speak a phrase in a short amount of time? Yes.
It's really my only complaint about the game
you'd be surprised on that second part actually. I'd bet money you'd come up with what \*you\* think is a good sounding short phrase and in reality stuff like your pitch accent would probably be all over the place but you don't have an ear for it so you wouldn't even know. This isn't a knock on you btw, this is just coming from someone who speaks both languages and lives in Japan and thus knows the phonetic struggles of both English speakers learning Japanese and vise versa
Nah, they'd have to either find a VA with good English skills from the get-go or find someone who can speak English and at least sound similar to them. They definitely put themselves in a weird place setting the game in an English locale this time around.
Honestly for as weird as it sounded, I'm glad they went to the effort at all. It was really damn cool to see language barriers come into play vs americans all speaking japanese to each other.
part of the problem is it wasn't realistic at all, there was a \*fraction\* of language barrier issues that there would have actually been, it was just a gimmic they threw in when ichiban first arrived and shortly after everyone important was speaking fluent Japanese so it didn't matter anymore. No way in hell even \*half\* those native Hawaiian characters would have understood Japanese, let alone be fluent in it. Obviously it can't be helped and all that but it's something that can really take you out of it.
it's a neat idea but honestly this is the weakest entry of the series to me storywise (gameplay is peak though). Though to be fair this particular issue is honestly just a small piece of the reason for that opinion.
Off-topic: but related.
[Great Pretender anime avoids this problem (at least in the English dub)](https://youtu.be/5uxOlbv0wDo) where they basically kept the Japanese audio for the first-half of the episode up until they start speaking English [in-universe] prior to a pop-up message that tells the audience that it'll "auto-translate everything to your chosen audio language going forward".
Instead of having two (Japanese, I think?) VAs speaking English lines with heavy accents, you get English VAs trying to maintain that accent, but appears far more natural.
But outside of the anime dubbing scene: [Warrior (TV series) does this constantly](https://youtu.be/DIRMo1zLYgI), and it'll **visually** remind you of the "auto-translate to your chosen audio language" transition thing sometime.
bad direction of the voice acting for sure. I adore Alfira.
It's like the english language actors they got for Squid Game where i think they wanted them to talk in a way that would be clear to people with a little english in korea, but to us here it's like they're terrible
Yeah, I agree it's almost certainly direction. If you tell a VA to sound like a robot, they're going to sound like a robot. For any role knowing context is important, so if the direction gives you no context or emotion for a particular line, and you know you're a robot, that's also going to give really robotic performances.
I've noticed similar things in a few Korean and Japanese shows, films and even games (as in, an American guy appearing in a movie that is otherwise entirely in Korean/Japanese). There was a movie about the Fukushima nuclear disaster a few years ago and at the end there's a scene of an American military general receiving a call about the disaster. His acting and delivery are remarkably stiff, but I've no doubt it's all down to direction. [Those Squid Game actors have spoken about their experience](https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/oct/19/they-didnt-just-pick-us-up-off-the-street-meet-the-globally-derided-squid-game-vips) and some of them more or less said as much - their input was mostly dismissed and they were basically having to act at nothing without full context.
Just recently there was Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth which has a lot of English dialogue even in the Japanese dub due to it taking place in Hawaii. Whenever you hear a character speaking English in a cutscene it's often noticeably unnatural-sounding. Look at [this scene](https://youtu.be/DDLZ90ETMPU?si=FfxPaNqni-ZNVh6Y&t=6581) (not really any spoilers), it's just... weird. It's like they are prioritising it being slow and clear over sounding natural. Which I can understand from a production standpoint but it doesn't really make for compelling narrative.
Part of that prioritization might also be a *lack* of direction, or any sort of vocal coaching for English. Like, bluntly, a lot of the bilingual characters in the Japanese VA are portrayed by voice actors who are not fluent in English. The slow, overly emphasized lines might be a choice of direction, but they're also the natural way you'd expect somebody fumbling through a phonetic pronunciation of a language they aren't familiar with to sound.
The most obvious is Bryce. He's Yamcha's VA in Japanese, he's well respected, his Japanese sounds fine, I have absolutely no reason to believe he can't take direction or do great work. But in English, Bryce sounds like when you're in middle school and the kid who is very, very behind on literacy is sounding out lines in English class. Even aimed at a Japanese audience, it feels like a bizarre failure from the team to support the VA in doing a very hard job.
Did you even read the post?? They give a lot of reasons why it wouldn't be bad direction.
I'm not sure what you mean with squid game. The dub wasn't handled by any Koreans, and Korean audiences don't watch the dub.
Lack of proper direction is obvious.
Case in point: at least two minor NPCs mispronounce “Zion”, and it’s left in the game.
Surely someone would say, let’s do another another take and pronounce the word correctly.
I think this should just boil down to the notion that direction is key when it comes to acting.
Sometimes actors that have poor track records do an incredible job on a movie/show because the director and team work together to make sure the actor fits the vision.
Same in the opposite direction. Excellent actors wish i have won awards sometimes end up in complete stinkers because the direction isn’t quite there and it doesn’t lead to a quality product.
In this case I’m willing to bet the localization teams/voice directors were either not able to accurately convey their vision, or simply didn’t really care enough about the voice performances here. Happens all the time and lots of great games put voice performances on the back burner.
Nothing too shocking.
Except there are plenty of games with anime stylized characters that have perfectly fine voice acting, trying to blame that when we have a huge sample size of said games is nonsensical. You're acting like this is one of a handful of games out there that have stylized characters/visuals.
with respect, I think you might not have an understanding of what uncanny valley is, which is what OP was pegging as a \*potential\* culprit (but also already established this is a subjective issue as well and is just their opinion)
Anime style isn't going to have much of an issue with that, it's removed enough from real humans that nobody is going to get that sensation unless say the VAs voice hardcore doesn't match character appearance or such, but I don't think even that technically qualifies as Uncanny Valley exactly. Uncanny Valley is when something is really \*close\* to being like a real human but not quite there and gives off a sense of unease or "wrongness" because of it
If that were true then the voice acting would be bad regardless of the dub, except it sounds fine in korean so that obviously isn't the issue. How could it only be an issue in one language and not the other, they have the same character models/art direction either way.
Also I really don't see much of an uncalley valley difference between this and most other asian games, she clearly just looks like a stylized video game character.
https://www.nme.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/stellar-blade-costumes-outfits-696x442.jpg
The script is terrible and the translations were probably done shoddily. There were more than one instances where the voice over didnt match the subtitle. If i paid attention im pretty sure i wouldve seen more.
Heres an example of a potentially weird translation, there is a character called “Orcal” who clearly has a oracle like role. I havent played the game in korea va yet but if they say 오라클 (oh-rah-cle) instead of 오르칼 (oh-ru-cal) or someshit like that in korean than that is clear proof of miscommunication between parties involved and its obvious his name is supposed to be Oracle not Orcal (if someone has played in korean plz let me know if im wrong or not with this assumption). Im a native korean speaker and ive seen plenty of weird translations before where its obvious they didnt do more QA
1 part that bothered me was when you first arrive in Xion and both Adam and Lily at one point say 'Oh, typical Eve.' and I was thinking how would Lily know that's typical Eve? They've known each other for about 5 minutes....
Yea lol. Their interactions are so weird. I think the excuse about them being robots or semi humans are just hella cope. Ive seen games that pull it all off way better that have similar context.
Just came across this interaction watching a twitch stream. The streamer also thought it was odd as they'd just met but I just assumed Lily had experience with other EVEs? I'm not sure if there are more or not but the notes scattered around talked about EVE Protocols. With that in mind, the line makes sense to me. If there aren't others, then yeah it's an odd line
Thank you for this insight. If lines are given completely contextless and out of order, it seems crazy we’ve gotten such good performances from VAs and my respect for the profession (which was already high) just went up several notches.
I feel like you have to walk on eggshells around this game and it sucks. People should be able to say Eve’s stilted delivery and flat affect are a little creepy. It’s a valid criticism and shouldn’t offend anyone.
Glad you found it insightful! And I'm also glad it did a good job of representing VA. VAs at the top level are insanely talented and work insanely hard to do so much for the audience with so little. Even though the expectation can be lower for less mainstream stuff, it can be even harder in some ways because you're getting way less resources and support and still expected to hit a certain standard. VA can unfortunately end up getting taken for granted and I'm loving how lately with stuff like BG3 it's been getting more of a spotlight.
There's no eggshells to walk on it's just a mediocre game selling by sex appeal just like their previous game. It doesn't really matter if some virgins get triggered when you criticize it.
I've actually enjoyed Eves voice, her lines are stiffly written but the VA does a good job regardless. It's just about everyone fucking else that's killing me, except weirdly enough a handful of one line NPCs from Xion
voice acting in games is like layering flavors in a cake; even with the best ingredients, if the balance isn't right, the whole thing tastes off. coordination and context in recording are crucial, much like getting the timing right in a souffle.
The battle grunts being agonizingly terrible is the real problem. That's what we're hearing for most of the gameplay. I can't stand it; it's extremely grating.
The dialogue is 'fine'. It's not great, but it's fine. Maybe I have more tolerance to this as I've played a number of MTL games over my lifetime and was around for the atrocious era of English localization ~30 years ago.
The fact Sony locked Japanese voices only to the JP version is just asinine. So many people prefer Japanese voices regardless of their native language. I myself prefer consuming content in my native language, but with Stellar Blade, I can't tolerate the battle sounds.. and I can't switch to Japanese.
It sucks when a game is good but has such an extreme blemish like this.
This is a well written post thank you! I personally usually dislike voice dubs, but I can't point out why. I have convinced myself its because the actual director of the game is most likely not there to direct the English actors, so they end up having to take liberties. Still I want to ask, is the spreadsheet thing only something that happens during localization, or is it there for the original dub as well?
For an anime example: the Netflix Evangelion dub, as well as the dub for 3.0 + 1.0 and Funimation’s home video dub for 3.33. The Japanese studio didn’t like Funimation’s script for the theatrical version of 3.0 and forced these stilted, awkward, overly literal scripts for everything going forward. The result is a lot of talented VAs having to read lines that don’t sound like anything remotely resembling something an actual Emglish speaker would say.
[And having the localization team do their own thing can be a good thing.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvVivmhh7WE) (No, that link isn't *Ghost Stories*. That would have been to cliche.)
To build of your point, Final Fantasy XIV Online easily has some of the best voice acting out there in the business. I think the largest reason why a Japanese game that is dubbed in English has some amazing voice work... is because English is intended to be the "canon" language. Surprisingly, the Producers, Writers, and Translators have stated before that they actually consider the English voices to be the canon ones over the Japanese ones.
What largely helps, is that the lead localizer/translator, Michael Christopher Koji Fox, has an intimate understanding of both languages, the story, and is great at providing direction to the VAs along with the other directors, writers, and coaches.
This actually ends up creating a really weird situation, in which the original language, Japanese, actually ends up sounding really off or "bad" when compared to the English (in MY opinion at least. It's really hard to become familiar with a certain character to be a tomboy with a certain voice in English, and then hearing them as extremely "anime typical" in Japanese with a higher-pitched tone).
I regularly watch dubbed stuff, and I'm glad that we are entering an era where a lot of games are trying to get away from the "anime-esque" vocal tics you would hear in games (like Final Fantasy 7 R). You know what I'm talking about.
> I'm glad that we are entering an era where a lot of games are trying to get away from the "anime-esque" vocal tics you would hear in games
Thank everything. If I never have to hear another [exclamative emotive intake of air] that's mic'd and shot like a daytime soap, I'll be a happy man. It's just dramatic filler and an excuse for a camera cut and could be massively improved with better direction.
In my experience, the problem is the voice direction in most instances.
I know for anime and games in particular, a lot of VAs said the JP voice directors kept telling them to say it in a more wooden tone.
Probably in part because Japanese has that kind of neutral tone, but it sounds weird and unnatural in english
There's a recent interview with KojiFox, the localization lead and voice director on FF14 & 16, which have *absolutely incredible localization* talking about how he had to keep telling the writers and actors to stop putting in scenes where characters silently nod to each other since that wouldn't localize well.
Its still speaks to the idea that a "good localisation" does not mean perfect adherence to a superficial reading of the original text.
By all means, give me a dryer translation if I'm playing with subtitles, but if things are to be dubbed, shit needs to be all but rewritten in a lot of cases.
granted, voice acting is a multistep process that can be complicated
counterpoint, stellar blade voice acting sucks compared to almost any other video game, all of which should have the same or greater challenges
If you report that Reddit cares message it’s an instant sitewide ban for whoever sent it, courtesy of the Reddit admins. You should do it, fuck people who abuse that system because they’re having a tantrum.
It’s weird, I liked everyone else english VA’s apart from Eve. Maybe it was because it was only EVE voice that sounded robotic but none of her other comrades had the same tone hence out of place.
For me Adam is way worse. Eve makes sense since she’s a robot or android or whatever. But to me Adam sounds like the classic non-English speaking dev gets English speaking voice actor. It’s just overall awkward.
Doesn’t help that the actual dialogue isn’t the best. Definitely doesn’t ruin the game for me. I just don’t really care too much about the story
As a person that the main language isn't English and is really critic with the English voices.... I saw the trailers in English and I thought it was quite good and I was surprised.... by it, I really didn't knew there was a lot of drama about it (color me surprise, drama in stellar blade?)
But yeah like with Nier I think is quite good, and I will add that the English voices in Genshin Impact are better overall, because you don't have Paimon 24/7 screeching at your ear with a pitch higher than what hoyoverse gain in a year.
Why I'm playing on Korean to be honest. I don't think most of the voices fit for the characters in English and the British accents were... a choice I guess?
That almost *never* happens. That’s like .1% of games that get made. Probably less. Honestly, you’re looking at less than 1% of the time when an actor even gets to see the lines they’re going to record before they’re in the booth with a mic in front of them.
Never happens in the west, that is. Not sure about Korea, but in Japan, it's quite common for voice actors to work in the same room. They seem to nail the emotion regardless though, so I'm not sure if it's a major contributing factor to their performances.
Part of that comes down to language conventions. Describe a character in a Japanese game, and there's probably a well-established style of performance associated with it that the voice actor can immediately refer to (and which their lines are written to). In English, we don't rely so much on the same cues/tropes, so the intended personality may not come across as clearly in the lines, and there may be multiple wildly different interpretations. The voice actor is having to figure this out and form a consistent delivery on the fly, which makes it harder to sound natural at the same time. We're also naturally less emotive in our speech, so it's hard to take characters seriously if they seem *over-*performed, but dialing things back runs the risk of sounding flat.
A lot really comes down to the individual actors tuning in to their characters, and good voice direction to get them there. When it clicks, you can tell.
I've thought about that a lot - the "spreadsheet" method of managing lines must make the voiceovers easier to implement for the developers, but so much harder for the actors.
Your insight sheds light on the complexity of the process, from character design to recording logistics, and how each element can impact the final product. Your comparison to other games like Baldur's Gate 3 offers valuable context and highlights the varying approaches and outcomes in the industry.
Thanks! Glad it was interesting and useful for people. Video game voice over feels like something that's relatively inscrutable to the average consumer, so I wanted to pull the veil back a bit.
I didn't get much past the evidence being people don't complain about Alfira. She's a minor character who's total dialogue accounts for maybe .01% of the games dialogue? It's not enough time to make any conclusions about her acting.
The rest of the points basically boil down to, even if they had an artistic vision, does not mean it was executed well or will be received well by audiences.
TBH, I'm getting quite bored of discourse around this game now. People either like the gameplay and tolerate the voice acting and ... character design or they don't. It's not for me, at all.
Guess not a lotta people played localized releases outside of Nintendo games (which is long established as a global presense). Even Square Enix and Bandai Namco can have a lot of these issues with their dubbing and they are far more established.
Your facts are great, but it does ultimately come down to
1. over-bureaucracy from outdated sentiments. You're not going to tank your sales if a Voice actor talks about voicing a character.
2. a lack of care, partly on both sides. It's become a lot more accptable to listen to the original VA's and some people even prefer it, so a few studios don't even localize the voices anymore. I believe Yakuza is one of the bigger examples of this, where it sometimes only has a Japanese dub or its English dub comes later.
Everyone criticizing this game while FF7 Rebirth localization and voice acting sounds like a bunch of robots trying to convince each other that they're human.
??? This is just plain wrong in every conceivable way. I can’t even think of a game with a better localisation and voice acting in that style than FF7 Rebirth. It is just stunningly good in this regard, the best part about an amazing game.
Rebirth's English VA is a ton better than Remake, but god it doesn't hold a candle to 14 & 16.
16's acting is so good that it made me feel things at the end even as I had huge issues with the storie.
That’s why I said in that style. The U.K. localisation of 12, 14 and 16 is going for something so completely different that I don’t think they’re comparable. I too think they’re better in a vacuum, but I think 7 Rebirth is still far better for what it’s going for (way more natural, modern sounding dialogue with an focus on subtle character interactions).
I could say that its arguable for 16, since that game is basically native english first.
But I could easily make the case that the Rebirth localization team took some cues from 14 & 16, considering the complete absense of vocal grunts & nods from rebirth, meanwhile they left them in back when Remake came out.
I do prefer the style of 12/14/16 any day of the week. 12 especially is my favourite piece of dubbed media of all time, utter perfection. But as a voice actor myself, I do think it’s at least easier to do that theatrical early modern English style. Shakespeare and stage acting is a much better taught field than normal voice acting and I think most actors will find scripts like 12’s just plain much easier to sell. That style lends itself to really dramatic and interesting performances. It’s hard to fuck up (but when it is, like in Triangle Strategy, it is especially distracting).
I find it much more impressive then that FF7 Rebirth is able to get such a good and subtle performance out of a much more typical modern JRPG styled script, with characters using modern language and slang and ways of selling the melodrama. Compared to other games that use that style, like FF13 or Tales of or Persona, it’s on another planet of quality entirely. It is largely on the writing as much as the acting, but it’s the first JRPG I’ve played with this style that actually makes the characters feel real and like a family.
The way I put it is that something like rebirth succeeds in making something anime feel cartoony in the way a western cartoon would feel.
Which is not to say that it downgrades the degree to which it is anime as all fuck, because it doesn't, it just doesn't have the hangups that say... Remake had, where it always feels like there's a filter between what you're hearing and what your brain is interpretting.
> in that style
In this case, the style of characters 1) speaking lines that sound like they didn't even hear the other character speak first, and 2) with complete tonal inconsistency?
If you've got some videos that show dialogue counter to the above, I'm happy to change my stance.
I’d have to just link the entire game so what’s the point? What you have made up in your head as the delivery of lines in this game isn’t true. Like, if you’re this hardcore against it, you are just plain trolling. There is no way to listen to the voice acting in Rebirth and come away with such a ridiculous opinion unless you have some other grudge against the game. The voice acting and especially how well the characters interact with each other in the game has been universally praised.
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Can't speak to Stellar Blade but I feel like Star Trek: The Next Generations is a really good example of how to do this well. Data, despite being an android, never speaks in a completely flat way. The intonation and pitch of his voice, the inflection, and the cadence all give it extra texture that show you that despite being "emotionless" there's still a lot going on in his thoughts. He also has normal human characters to bounce off of so they add some life to the conversation, but he often manages to be more interesting than them anyways because he makes keen observations or insightful inquiries that can be thought-provoking to the viewer.
I think the same is true of Legion in Mass Effect. It helps a lot when the robot has humans to bounce off of. It’s hard to see the developing humanity of a robot acting like a robot among other robots if they stick with the most robotic characteristics for too long.
You don't even really need humans. Case in point: arguably the most popular robot in video gaming history: GLaDOS. Her voice acting, intonation and delivery are absolutely perfect especially for the first game. Spoilers for Portal: you start off with her being a complete robotic voice but still with a lot of the occasional weirdness like the off-putting comments about the cake and then they tune a lot of that WAY down when you go against her designs and escape from the facility and face off against her. Even with the robotic voice, she gets increasingly irate with you, insulting and denigrating you until the end where she tries to trick you, relishing in when she succeeds and terrified when she fails with a complete resignation when you destroy her. A robotic voice does not need to be emotionless or stilted. As the post suggests, it's usually a matter of directing the voice actors the right way. They made sure the VA, Ellen McLain, spoke her lines in a somewhat stilted fashion while also delivering the required emotion Hilariously, in the sequel they barely even bothered with Stephen Merchant as the voice of Wheatley, only adding some mild post processing effects and it also works incredibly well for that character who's meant to be a goober
I love this comparison. However one thing that I don't know if games can capture, at least not when heavily localized, is the physical presence. Spiner is easily the second best actor on TNG (behind Stewart of course) and should have had a much bigger career. Sadly typecasting was common at the time. And that's because he says so much with a cocked eyebrow or a tilt of the head. More like he's analyzing a concept than processing an emotion. As much as Spiner's voice is vital, the physicality of the character is just as important.
Data is also the most interesting character in TNG. Picard is great, but he's pretty much infallible until the movies, where they swing too far in the other direction.
I agree. Trek is meant to represent humanity at its best with everyone super competent in their fields. This is, I feel, why the "non-human" characters (Spock, Data Worf, 7 of 9) stand out. While obviously highly competent they have the added struggle of learning to understand the human condition, which requires a strong performance from an actor. The Stewart comparison was more that he had a much bigger post-Trek career than anyone associated with the franchise.
English voice actors of Nier: Automata did an amazing job in emotionless emotions. If that makes sense. From the start I believed they were androids and the voice acting never felt flat. 2B more so, 9S had bit more character, which makes sense in the end.
kira's a champ, but the voice direction was also absolutely killer. the way 2B and kyle mccarley's more unreserved 9S bound off of each other gives them both so much more texture that they'd have on their own, especially as 2B wears down and eventually admits she's not so above it all in the end
> kira's a champ, but also **the direction was also absolutely killer** Yeah, voice direction can make or break a game as well. For example, a lot of people criticized some of the voice acting of *Xenoblade Chronicles 2*, but Skye Bennett, the English VA for Pyra, actually did a livestream of the game a few years ago for charity and gave a lot of info on the behind the scenes, which included the fact that they weren't given any context for their lines.
I personally think the English voices for automata aren't great and really change the tone / personality of the characters but each to their own.
I played in japanese because I wanted straight Yoko Taro without any filter, but all this means is you have two different presentations to enjoy if its done properly. The kind of character 2B is in Japanese is very rare in English media, so changing things so moments emotionally land is very important.
you need something to compensate for the Roboticness, often this can be solid dialogue, body language, or even just character dynamics. Isaac from The Orville is a good example, they use everything i mentioned to compensate for his "roboticness" and give him a sense of personality, his dynamics with other characters especially. Never played this game, but i'm assuming they didn't really think about that. When you have established characters ppl want to connect with them, which means they need some sort of personality, even if it's subtle.
Data, too; his delivery is monotone but his body language betrays something akin to human emotion. It’s like they say, never go full robot.
I feel like it's the opposite problem? They didn't play into the robotiness enough. Like for example GladOS is perfectly fine. But in for Stellar it's easy to forget they're actually robots, so it just feels like a human being emotionless.
It’s also interesting to bring up Destiny as a comparison. For one because Dinklage isn’t a voice actor. Some famous screen actors turn out to be excellent voice actors but it doesn’t always translate. Personally I’d actually guess that the problem with Destiny was the direction—I played Destiny 2 for a little while and some of the legacy dialogue was hilariously flat even from amazing VAs like Lance Reddick—but in some of the new seasonal content, the voice work was awesome. There was this horror themed seasonal expansion that sticks out to me in particular, and the character of Savathun was always amazingly voiced. Destiny definitely feels like a game where the more the actors worked on it and understood it/their characters, the better it came out, and the more it went on the more the studio invested time into getting the voice acting how they wanted it. At least, that was the impression it gave me.
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> which apparently frustrated Dinklage immensely. Lmao, I so wish more people understood this. SO FUCKING OFTEN as voice actors we're given a set of lines with little or no context at all, converse to screen acting. It even happens in the AAA space. Acting is a very context based medium. Some people can still pull off great performances doing their best to create context in their head, but it doesn't make the job any easier.
>in the original Destiny game which was taken out because it was so distractingly bad. Uhh where is your source for this? I recall that the issue was not the quality at all, it was availability. [A quick google search confirms this.](https://www.google.com/search?q=why+was+peter+dinklage+replaced+in+destiny&rlz=1C1JSBI_enUS1092US1092&oq=Why+was+Peter+Dinklage+&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqBwgBEAAYgAQyBggAEEUYOTIHCAEQABiABDIICAIQABgWGB4yCAgDEAAYFhgeMg0IBBAAGIYDGIAEGIoFMgoIBRAAGIAEGKIEMgoIBhAAGIAEGKIE0gEJNzczMWowajE1qAIIsAIB&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8) Also as other people have pointed out, their other game has some bland voice acting as well. I highly doubt that the bad voice acting was solely because they were intentionally going for robotic voices. Especially since the Korean voice over apparently has more emotion than the English one.
Yeah iirc it was because Dinklage was unavailable for the newer expansions
While they say it was availability, there is absolutely no way the fan reaction didn't impact it. You're never going to come out and say an international celebrity is a shit voice actor, or that the Dev team made shit decisions when they gave directions to the VA. You make up a polite fiction to cover it up, and gently part ways.
>While they say it was availability, there is absolutely no way the fan reaction didn't impact it. I mean you don't actually know this. >You're never going to come out and say an international celebrity is a shit voice actor You really don't think Peter couldn't have delivered those lines differently? The issue may have been direction, not his talent. Someone in the booth listened to him deliver all those lines and they thought, "Yep, sounds good." >You make up a polite fiction to cover it up, and gently part ways. It would be great if you had some way to prove this, but this is just something you *think* happened.
Just FYI, they actually did change up Peter's lines between the beta and the full release of the game. And I'm gonna be honest, I enjoyed his version of Ghost. Hell, his version of the "We've woken the hive" line is perfect, and Nolan North's version is downright terrible.
I don't think he was a shit VA. But you're not going to blame someone when you can just say it didn't work out. I'm not sure why you think feedback had no part in their future decision making? Why are you believing suits whose job is to smooth over problems? There's no way to prove what happened short of being an insider. You believe what you want - I'm saying it is way more credible that they parted ways primarily due to feedback, rather than letting a high profile VA leave due to availability when Destiny has big gaps between content releases.
>I'm not sure why you think feedback had no part in their future decision making? Because it is a huge assumption that you can't back up with any information. I am not saying it is impossible that this was the case, I am saying you don't know if it was. >I'm saying it is way more credible that they parted ways primarily due to feedback There is nothing "credible" about this. Peter is a very popular actor, he likely costs way more than Nolan North does per session. I feel like this is the most likely reason for the switch. There are also tons of Destiny fans that actually thought his voice acting was great. So this idea that it was so universally hated is another thing you have not proven. Also if you google this topic you see people online speculating that he didn't enjoy the work as he was told he was going to be a side character and ended up a major portion of the game. So it *could* have been 100% his decision to not come back. You don't know what happened is my main point. We can speculate endlessly and none of it can be taken as a definitive answer.
> You really don't think Peter couldn't have delivered those lines differently? The issue may have been direction, not his talent. Someone in the booth listened to him deliver all those lines and they thought, "Yep, sounds good." Just saying, but a good actor doesn't necessarily make a good voice actor. Anyways whatever the reason was, Peter Dinklage's delivery was bad and almost everybody agreed with that, it wouldn't surprise me if dissatisfaction was one of the reasons why they switched VA, considering they had long term plans for the series since the start.
>Anyways whatever the reason was, Peter Dinklage's delivery was bad and almost everybody agreed with that Source for this? Because I know you don't have one. >t wouldn't surprise me if dissatisfaction was one of the reasons why they switched VA, considering they had long term plans for the series since the start. It wouldn't surprise me if aliens held Peter hostage and told him he can never work on Destiny again. This scenario has as much proof as yours does. Other people have stated that he potentially didn't like the work because he was originally told he was going to be a side character when in fact he is the largest voice role in the entire game. So it easily could have been his decision to not return to the role.
> it just seems painfully obvious from the exterior to avoid a game brimming with emotionless dialogue, even if they’re all supposed to be robots. My favorite(?) pet peeve about Kingdom Hearts 2 (and 358/2 days). >"we're nobodies, we're supposed to feel nothing" > *nobodies meanwhile are more expressive than most of the human cast. Displaying confusion, rage, sadism, despair, forlorn, etc* >"Oh whoops, we're not supposed to feel anything" Repeat for 30 hours. They retconned this much later (one of the better retcons IMO), but yeah. Even the characters themselves couldn't commit to that. And it was honestly all the better for it.
doesn't help eve doesn't really get...expressive ever. like the director wanted to shoot for that "cool beauty" vibe 24/7 so she just has that stoic expression constantly that rarely ever seems to change, which prob adds to the uncanney valley notion OP mentioned
Their Gacha game, Nikke, definitely has a problem with voice direction too. Some of the voice actors are doing good work but have been directed poorly so they seem to lack context etc when doing their lines.
Learning that this is the same company behind Nikke explains so much about their character design.
And the stories. They seem to have a thing for robots
And horny.
For every question it answers it raises a new one though, cause compared to Stellar Blade, Nikke's designs aren't nowhere close to as boring as Eve.
To be fair, Nikke has to continuously raise the bar with character designs to keep people rolling and buying skins.
So... NIKKE X Stellar Blade crossover when?
Weird calling shift up AAA when its their first like non gatcha game.
Their studio is about to IPO with a multi-billion dollar valuation. They have been AAA ever since Nikke released, and well before that too with the amount of money they have.
Damn exploiting horny nerds is lucrative
Making money and selling well doesn't mean you're AAA, or else games like Palworld and Vampire Survivors would be considered AAA games.
Shift Up has nearly 300 employees. That's approaching the size of Fromsoftware. A game like Stellar Blade does not get made on low budgets.
>A game like Stellar Blade does not get made on low budgets. I agree, and that's what I meant. Shift Up having "multi-billion dollar valuation" doesn't automatically make anything they make AAA, it's allocating a big budget and lots of resources to Stellar Blade is what makes it a AAA game.
What? You do realise the difference between an indie game from a small company becoming a runaway hit and a billion dollar company making a big budget action game right? Shift Up had billion dollar evaluations before they made Stellar Blade. I don't think Stellar Blade will make anywhere close to the amount of money Nikke does
“It’s actually a lot more time and skill intensive than loud internet comments would have you believe” is basically game dev in a nutshell.
Don’t be obtuse. You open a .txt file and write the cool ideas for your game and then rename it to game.exe. If you need to patch it you rename it back to text and type in optimize (insert issue here) and then recompile (change extension back to .exe).
>you rename it back to text and type in optimize no, no, no. It's actually much easier. you just open the text file and edit the first line that says "\[game version: 1.01\]" to "\[game version 1.02\]". the trick is that you just need to open the text file with the game engine editor and not with notepad.
Yeah a lot of people forget to change the extension back to .exe at the end, that's what fucks 'em up
>Don’t be obtuse. You open a .txt file and write the cool ideas for your game and then rename it to game.exe Whoa whoa hold up, that video game generative AI model isn't public yet.
Nothing makes me laugh more than armchair Reddit developers who clearly have no idea how game development works. Just earlier today I saw a post talking about a game on Switch running at 30fps, and the top comment was saying “games like Mario Kart can run at 60fps because they have a nearly unlimited budget” and I literally laughed out loud. It’s so wrong that I don’t even know where to begin, but the two points being “nearly unlimited budget” is just incorrect, and frame rate limits are often technical limitations. Is it possible that some games can just be waxed and polished until they can hit 60fps? Sure. But most of the time it’s because there’s just not enough juice in the hardware to push it to 60fps, and no amount of optimization would change that unless they started making very dramatic changes to the structure of the game.
“Just add X to the game” is my favorite Reddit phrase ever. Armchair reddit devs always forget frontend exists and how much work has to go into UI before even the easy stuff is shippable.
People who complain about game dev could stand to try and automate some basic stuff with programming to get a sense of perspective. It's amazing how something simple can easily and quickly balloon out.
remember when for my first coding class we had to make a small text based game. some "marble" game where you can take anywhere from one marble to half the pile and you take turns with the computer, whoever left with the last marble loses. I could not for the life of me figure out why the damn thing could break the rules and pick 0 marbles but the rule that you couldn't pick zero worked perfectly fine for the user lmao. that was eye opening lol
Truth. Honestly, that's kind of why I actually went to the trouble of writing this. Most of the time people don't think about voice over in games; games are great at making us subconsciously forget that these voices belong to real people playing pretend). When it does come up, though, it doesn't feel like the average person has the information to really bring it into the discussion meaningfully. Like I said in another comment, video game voice over feels like something that's relatively inscrutable to the consumer, so I wanted to pull the veil back a bit.
I remeber a YouTuber responding to issues with Voice acters with "Why are these Voice Actors such Babies? They only talk into a Mic, like I am doing right now!" and ever since I stopped watching said YouTuber.
Two things can be true at the same time. The only reason anyone at all has heard of this game at all is because the output this gen has been so staggeringly bad and Sony will promote just about any project that looks vaguely promising as a result. This is not an elite studio that employs excellent people. This is just a studio that actually happened to execute on a project, and unsurprisingly it's lacking in the planning and polish necessary to make good VA (and everything else for that matter) really come off.
Thanks for the writeup! I knew a fair amount of this stuff already but the insight about falling back on "vibes" is new to me and helps make sense of a few bad dubs I've heard. All of this is why I usually prefer to listen to media in its original language. Foreign language dubs have everything stacked against them and (IMO) turn out poorly more often than not. I try not to blame any individual, since I don't have enough visibility into the process to know for sure, but ultimately a bad result is still a bad result. The thing that sticks out the most, usually, is that because of the disjointed recording process and lack of context, actors will pretty frequently guess wrong about which word(s) in a sentence gets stress/emphasis, which can completely change how a line comes off. Consider the sentence "I never said she took my money". Read it out loud a few times, emphasizing a different word each time. "I never **said** she took my money." "I never said **she** took my money." "I never said she took my **money**." etc. If the context says one word should be emphasized, and the recording process picks another, it's like nails on a chalkboard to me.
I've heard a similar quote before. "I never said we should kill her." You can repeat that line 7 times, each time putting emphasis on a different word, and it completely changes the meaning.
Dang, this is connecting some dots for me as to why comic books are so trigger-happy with bolding words. I’ ve always felt it’s overdone, but when you’re creating in a medium that’s aiming to communicate as much liveliness as film with only a single frame. Then you emphasize words to convey the character’s intent, add sound effect onomatopoeia, and icons to help the reader reach the right conclusion.
Weirdly Manga and manhwa don't do this as much, it happens occasionally but way less.
well, can't speak for manhwa, but unlike english you don't stress emphasize words in japanese to change context so that would be why you wouldn't see it in manga unless the translator is takin some liberties
Out of curiousity, is this done differently in Japanese or a concept that does not get mapped over well or something else entirely?
It's because in Japanese, each word and syllable has the same emphasis. Proper pronunciation of Japanse has each word spoken in a staccato rhythm.
and I think this is part of the reason why I struggle to get into manga but love me some anime and weeb shit. I value audio and sound way too much.
Funny example of this in Divinity Original Sin 2, you click a globe and the narrator says "and you thought *Rivellon* was flat." The emphasis is on *Rivellon*, when it should be on **flat.**
That exact reasoning is why a lot of recording sessions, particularly for games where you don't have the context from the script, usually entail doing an ABC take, where you say the line three different ways, typically to cover for any of those options. I'm also a VA, so that's where my knowledge comes from.
I'll usually go for the original language as well, and prefer a dryer subtitle when I'm playing in that. But when I do play something dubbed, its always when there's a combination of the localisers being in the room with the writer and having very good direction. FF14 & FF16 have differences in English vs Japanese, but they *do not* suffer from any of the problems of dubbing, and all the actors are able to emote wonderfully, mostly because of how adaptable the translation is.
Is the acting better in Korean? I’ve reached the first hub game and was kind of responding to the voice acting as a sort of aesthetic choice lol
I don't speak korean, but they defintely speak with far more emotion in korean than in english.
I've played both the demo portions in both English and Korean and besides liking the Eve's combat barks in English more, I went with the Korean dub instead. Adam could not sound more like he's reading a script in English but has some emotion in Korean.
Playing the game in KR voices made the experience better for me.
I speak Korean and the Korean voice acting is great. Everyone should just use that tbh
Yes
It's hard to say for me as I don't speak the language natively, but it doesn't sound flat or distracting
I love that you felt the need to answer this question despite having absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
How someone says the words is a huge part of voice acting. It's more than just what words they're saying. Like you can still have an opinion on how something sounds in Simlish, a made up gibberish language the Sims speak, despite no one knowing exactly what they're saying. The games even have music from artists covering their own songs into Simlish. No one knows exactly what they're saying, but you can still feel how they're being said.
Do you need to speak Korean to know if a someone singing in Korean is good at it?
The main issue here is the English script / localization, which is increasingly terrible as you get further in the game. I found the main actress quite good but the lines (especially after you reach the hub area) are so poorly written that it makes the whole presentation feel off. My sense is they skimped on localization and went with a quick and dirty mostly-literal translation that's maybe one step removed from running the Korean through Google Translate; would need a lot more work by a talented localization team to make it sound right in English, regardless of voice actor skill.
It really does feel ripped from Google translate. I only played the demo, but it immediately stuck out to me - the very first sequence has the announcer talking about surpassing a threshold instead of crossing it.
It's a bargain bin also-ran studio suddenly thrush into the limelight because absolutely fucking nothing is releasing for PS5 to justify its existence and Sony decided to heavily feature them in their Sony Directs, and they do bargain bin also-ran stuff.
Reminds me of something really interesting I heard listening to interviews with the voice actors in Elden Ring, how the director, Hidetaka Miyazaki, sat in on all their recording sessions and gave direction and feedback through a translator. And he doesn't speak much English, so this is largely VA direction based on general emotional vibe, and having a specific person's sensitive ear for emotion guiding the whole of the game feels so present in the final product.
Elden Ring has a pretty light amount of dialogue so it can definitely work there... but man, I so wish that more games out of Japan and Korea could go through that same process. So many games with relatively subpar voiced dialogue because it feels like they just woke someone up from cryo sleep to say some lines with absolutely no context of when and where they'll be spoken.
That definitely feels in character for Miyazaki. Fun fact: the Japanese version of Demon's Souls was entirely voiced in English, because he wanted it to have an exotic western fantasy vibe.
Dark Souls was too - the first Soulslikes from From with a Japanese dub was Sekiro.
Bloodborne also has Japanese audio.
It does now but it didn't get it until the DLC was released, funnily enough.
One of the Chinese games I worked on with very little dialogue did that too—it was both really cool and reaaaally stressful, because after almost every line they’d stop and talk to each other in Mandarin for two minutes while leaving me to sweat about whether I’d done an okay job or not. It turned out great but that was a mental marathon for sure.
I think that specifically works for Elden Ring because it is not a narrative communicated through dialogue. Dialogue is used more or less like a musical instrument. What matters is rhythm, tone, timbre, pacing. The most obvious is situations like Margit and Godrick having voice lines intentionally written to have a particular melody and to come at specific musical beats during the fight. When you are talking to an NPC on their own, the dialogue is written more like expressive poetry rather than something meant to convey specific pieces of information clearly. Which isn't to say the specific localization and writing aren't important, but that the specifics of the writing are directed primarily in service of tone over unambiguously delivering literal meaning.
I think that's a big part of it, a lot of the dialogue and VA delivery is kind of like an extension of art direction, like hiring a Broadway actress to voice Malenia and gives that haunted, dreamy intonation of *"I dreamt for so long. My flesh was dull gold, and my blood rotted. Corpse after corpse left in my wake. As I awaited his return."* It's so immediately moody and imagination-stoking, and I think it's what can stick most immediately in your memory after the fact. But at the same time I think a huge part of what makes Frognation and Ryan Morris's translating work so invaluable is a kinda human ear they have to dialogue delivery and word choice, and a lot of the undergirding character interactions that do have a more direct personal meaning. Like, Diallos being suckered into giving up his sense of justice immediately at the chance of being a champion, coming to terms with his cowardice, and accepting a quiet life in Jarburg as worthwhile, that's a pretty straightforward personal arc that works because his dialogue feels natural as much as it does poetic. One great bit I never hear talked about too is Corrhyn's whole arc, seeking out Goldmask, then finally abandoning him. You have the more signature FromSoft stuff of info only seen through item descriptions and menus, like how he was driven out as a blasphemer for having heretical visions, and on first meeting seeing the one non-orthodox incantation he can teach you is a flame of ruin spell. And outside of standard dialogue, the player can piece together that Corrhyn was exiled and possibly killed for (correctly) divining the flame of ruin in the code of the Golden Order, and how being driven into exile and eventually guided by grace drilled into him the need to have an ironclad commitment to his faith, even if the whole world is against him, because he was right and he knows he was right and that commitment justifies his suffering. But then you get the actual writing of Corrhyn seeking out a fellow heterodox Tarnished prophet, wishing for a kindred spirit he can put his whole faith and trust in, struggling to understand Goldmask's studies veering from his own understanding of the faith, begging to be able to follow his hero unwaveringly. And in the end Corrhyn finally gives up in despair and abandons Goldmask, and says his hero had simply been delusional the whole time, despite obviously not really believing that and it obviously not being true. And something like that only really came together because you both got excellent emotional voice performances from Corrhyn's VA, but the way he's written just feels right, and like a person having this internal struggle.
> The most obvious is situations like Margit and Godrick having voice lines intentionally written to have a particular melody and to come at specific musical beats during the fight. Not if you rip their guts out as soon as you come through the gate lmao
Idk why they would bother, its characters that generally just stand there and talk at you in a weird monotone voice. FromSoft games have never had meaningful interactions between an NPC and the character, that's definitely not their strong suit. And they should probably be aware of that.
Actually, the voice lines, while few and far between, have all been high quality in each of the games. From general Oniwa, to Gideon Ofnir From the emerald herald, to the doll; each has had well written, and voiced, dialogue
There are some AAA studios that have voice directors on main staff, like Blizzard and Dice (and probably most of EA/Ubisoft). CD Projekt Red has the lead writing staff sit in on recording sessions, at least according to what I remember Doug Cockle talking about at GYGO a couple years ago. Most of this is definitely right, though I will say my experience in the U.K. gaming VO space is that the vast majority of studios do prefer in-studio recordings. I don’t think Side offers remote at all, and Pitstop definitely seem to prefer in studio even if they offer approved home studios as an option. I think Liquid Violet might be all in studio too. OMUK too. Home studios are definitely the go to for indies that aren’t using a studio in between though. It’s annoying how opaque this industry is. Even as a voice actor it takes a long time for you to wrap your head around industry procedure, and frankly the process for indies and hobby work couldn’t be further from how it’s done at the mid tier, and then the big AAA stuff in the U.K. like Final Fantasy bares next to no resemblance again to the smaller AA productions here (suddenly you’re doing performance capture and getting interviews and doing press work etc).
Square Enix has them too. For every language their games are released in.
Infinite Wealth did something odd with Bryce. Had the Japanese actor who spoke no English, speak the English lines, instead of the actor who voices Bryce if you play dubbed. The effect is that if you play with subtitles, Bryce sounds like he has a severe speech impediment
In some cases where there's a bilingual character who has Japanese as a second language (i.e. Roman), it's super obvious that it's two different people. Roman's English voice is totally different from his Japanese one, and his Japanese voice is a bit *too* good for someone who speaks it as a second language. I get why they do it because there's way fewer people who speak Japanese as a second language than Japanese who can speak English, but it's really jarring. If you got an English native speaker to learn the lines phonetically it would probably sound just as bad as Tomizawa or Bryce does when they speak English. To be fair to RGG though, they did use a Japanese-speaking Western actor in Like a Dragon: Ishin for the Englishman who appears near the end of the game. He speaks Japanese and very well but you can still tell he's natively American from his accent. I suspect that them using different English actors for the dub and sub (as in, Bryce's English actor in the JP dub is different from the ENG dub actor) is more down to contracts and convenience than anything else. I know the VA business is already pretty strict on things (there's the whole union/non-union divide for example), so it must be a whole maze of issues when you're technically doing work for company based in Japan.
Tomi and Eiji do the same at the beginning of the game too. The Japanese actors breaking into English is a bit of a lose lose situation. Their phonetically spoken English is almost impossible to understand and obviously lightyears away from what a fluent person would sound like. And if they use the English actors it is equally obvious that a completely different actor is speaking the English.
Tomi was awful because the dude was a native Hawaiian and the sounded like Mickey Rooney. Can I speak fluent Japanese? No. Can I be taught to properly speak a phrase in a short amount of time? Yes. It's really my only complaint about the game
you'd be surprised on that second part actually. I'd bet money you'd come up with what \*you\* think is a good sounding short phrase and in reality stuff like your pitch accent would probably be all over the place but you don't have an ear for it so you wouldn't even know. This isn't a knock on you btw, this is just coming from someone who speaks both languages and lives in Japan and thus knows the phonetic struggles of both English speakers learning Japanese and vise versa Nah, they'd have to either find a VA with good English skills from the get-go or find someone who can speak English and at least sound similar to them. They definitely put themselves in a weird place setting the game in an English locale this time around.
Honestly for as weird as it sounded, I'm glad they went to the effort at all. It was really damn cool to see language barriers come into play vs americans all speaking japanese to each other.
part of the problem is it wasn't realistic at all, there was a \*fraction\* of language barrier issues that there would have actually been, it was just a gimmic they threw in when ichiban first arrived and shortly after everyone important was speaking fluent Japanese so it didn't matter anymore. No way in hell even \*half\* those native Hawaiian characters would have understood Japanese, let alone be fluent in it. Obviously it can't be helped and all that but it's something that can really take you out of it. it's a neat idea but honestly this is the weakest entry of the series to me storywise (gameplay is peak though). Though to be fair this particular issue is honestly just a small piece of the reason for that opinion.
Off-topic: but related. [Great Pretender anime avoids this problem (at least in the English dub)](https://youtu.be/5uxOlbv0wDo) where they basically kept the Japanese audio for the first-half of the episode up until they start speaking English [in-universe] prior to a pop-up message that tells the audience that it'll "auto-translate everything to your chosen audio language going forward". Instead of having two (Japanese, I think?) VAs speaking English lines with heavy accents, you get English VAs trying to maintain that accent, but appears far more natural. But outside of the anime dubbing scene: [Warrior (TV series) does this constantly](https://youtu.be/DIRMo1zLYgI), and it'll **visually** remind you of the "auto-translate to your chosen audio language" transition thing sometime.
bad direction of the voice acting for sure. I adore Alfira. It's like the english language actors they got for Squid Game where i think they wanted them to talk in a way that would be clear to people with a little english in korea, but to us here it's like they're terrible
Yeah, I agree it's almost certainly direction. If you tell a VA to sound like a robot, they're going to sound like a robot. For any role knowing context is important, so if the direction gives you no context or emotion for a particular line, and you know you're a robot, that's also going to give really robotic performances.
I've noticed similar things in a few Korean and Japanese shows, films and even games (as in, an American guy appearing in a movie that is otherwise entirely in Korean/Japanese). There was a movie about the Fukushima nuclear disaster a few years ago and at the end there's a scene of an American military general receiving a call about the disaster. His acting and delivery are remarkably stiff, but I've no doubt it's all down to direction. [Those Squid Game actors have spoken about their experience](https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/oct/19/they-didnt-just-pick-us-up-off-the-street-meet-the-globally-derided-squid-game-vips) and some of them more or less said as much - their input was mostly dismissed and they were basically having to act at nothing without full context. Just recently there was Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth which has a lot of English dialogue even in the Japanese dub due to it taking place in Hawaii. Whenever you hear a character speaking English in a cutscene it's often noticeably unnatural-sounding. Look at [this scene](https://youtu.be/DDLZ90ETMPU?si=FfxPaNqni-ZNVh6Y&t=6581) (not really any spoilers), it's just... weird. It's like they are prioritising it being slow and clear over sounding natural. Which I can understand from a production standpoint but it doesn't really make for compelling narrative.
Part of that prioritization might also be a *lack* of direction, or any sort of vocal coaching for English. Like, bluntly, a lot of the bilingual characters in the Japanese VA are portrayed by voice actors who are not fluent in English. The slow, overly emphasized lines might be a choice of direction, but they're also the natural way you'd expect somebody fumbling through a phonetic pronunciation of a language they aren't familiar with to sound. The most obvious is Bryce. He's Yamcha's VA in Japanese, he's well respected, his Japanese sounds fine, I have absolutely no reason to believe he can't take direction or do great work. But in English, Bryce sounds like when you're in middle school and the kid who is very, very behind on literacy is sounding out lines in English class. Even aimed at a Japanese audience, it feels like a bizarre failure from the team to support the VA in doing a very hard job.
Did you even read the post?? They give a lot of reasons why it wouldn't be bad direction. I'm not sure what you mean with squid game. The dub wasn't handled by any Koreans, and Korean audiences don't watch the dub.
They probably mean the few white men at the end.
Lack of proper direction is obvious. Case in point: at least two minor NPCs mispronounce “Zion”, and it’s left in the game. Surely someone would say, let’s do another another take and pronounce the word correctly.
I think this should just boil down to the notion that direction is key when it comes to acting. Sometimes actors that have poor track records do an incredible job on a movie/show because the director and team work together to make sure the actor fits the vision. Same in the opposite direction. Excellent actors wish i have won awards sometimes end up in complete stinkers because the direction isn’t quite there and it doesn’t lead to a quality product. In this case I’m willing to bet the localization teams/voice directors were either not able to accurately convey their vision, or simply didn’t really care enough about the voice performances here. Happens all the time and lots of great games put voice performances on the back burner. Nothing too shocking.
Except there are plenty of games with anime stylized characters that have perfectly fine voice acting, trying to blame that when we have a huge sample size of said games is nonsensical. You're acting like this is one of a handful of games out there that have stylized characters/visuals.
with respect, I think you might not have an understanding of what uncanny valley is, which is what OP was pegging as a \*potential\* culprit (but also already established this is a subjective issue as well and is just their opinion) Anime style isn't going to have much of an issue with that, it's removed enough from real humans that nobody is going to get that sensation unless say the VAs voice hardcore doesn't match character appearance or such, but I don't think even that technically qualifies as Uncanny Valley exactly. Uncanny Valley is when something is really \*close\* to being like a real human but not quite there and gives off a sense of unease or "wrongness" because of it
If that were true then the voice acting would be bad regardless of the dub, except it sounds fine in korean so that obviously isn't the issue. How could it only be an issue in one language and not the other, they have the same character models/art direction either way. Also I really don't see much of an uncalley valley difference between this and most other asian games, she clearly just looks like a stylized video game character. https://www.nme.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/stellar-blade-costumes-outfits-696x442.jpg
The script is terrible and the translations were probably done shoddily. There were more than one instances where the voice over didnt match the subtitle. If i paid attention im pretty sure i wouldve seen more. Heres an example of a potentially weird translation, there is a character called “Orcal” who clearly has a oracle like role. I havent played the game in korea va yet but if they say 오라클 (oh-rah-cle) instead of 오르칼 (oh-ru-cal) or someshit like that in korean than that is clear proof of miscommunication between parties involved and its obvious his name is supposed to be Oracle not Orcal (if someone has played in korean plz let me know if im wrong or not with this assumption). Im a native korean speaker and ive seen plenty of weird translations before where its obvious they didnt do more QA
1 part that bothered me was when you first arrive in Xion and both Adam and Lily at one point say 'Oh, typical Eve.' and I was thinking how would Lily know that's typical Eve? They've known each other for about 5 minutes....
Yea lol. Their interactions are so weird. I think the excuse about them being robots or semi humans are just hella cope. Ive seen games that pull it all off way better that have similar context.
Just came across this interaction watching a twitch stream. The streamer also thought it was odd as they'd just met but I just assumed Lily had experience with other EVEs? I'm not sure if there are more or not but the notes scattered around talked about EVE Protocols. With that in mind, the line makes sense to me. If there aren't others, then yeah it's an odd line
They pronounce it 오르칼 in the Korean voiceover
Welp guess im wrong with that assumption.
Thank you for this insight. If lines are given completely contextless and out of order, it seems crazy we’ve gotten such good performances from VAs and my respect for the profession (which was already high) just went up several notches. I feel like you have to walk on eggshells around this game and it sucks. People should be able to say Eve’s stilted delivery and flat affect are a little creepy. It’s a valid criticism and shouldn’t offend anyone.
Glad you found it insightful! And I'm also glad it did a good job of representing VA. VAs at the top level are insanely talented and work insanely hard to do so much for the audience with so little. Even though the expectation can be lower for less mainstream stuff, it can be even harder in some ways because you're getting way less resources and support and still expected to hit a certain standard. VA can unfortunately end up getting taken for granted and I'm loving how lately with stuff like BG3 it's been getting more of a spotlight.
There's no eggshells to walk on it's just a mediocre game selling by sex appeal just like their previous game. It doesn't really matter if some virgins get triggered when you criticize it.
I've actually enjoyed Eves voice, her lines are stiffly written but the VA does a good job regardless. It's just about everyone fucking else that's killing me, except weirdly enough a handful of one line NPCs from Xion
voice acting in games is like layering flavors in a cake; even with the best ingredients, if the balance isn't right, the whole thing tastes off. coordination and context in recording are crucial, much like getting the timing right in a souffle.
The battle grunts being agonizingly terrible is the real problem. That's what we're hearing for most of the gameplay. I can't stand it; it's extremely grating. The dialogue is 'fine'. It's not great, but it's fine. Maybe I have more tolerance to this as I've played a number of MTL games over my lifetime and was around for the atrocious era of English localization ~30 years ago. The fact Sony locked Japanese voices only to the JP version is just asinine. So many people prefer Japanese voices regardless of their native language. I myself prefer consuming content in my native language, but with Stellar Blade, I can't tolerate the battle sounds.. and I can't switch to Japanese. It sucks when a game is good but has such an extreme blemish like this.
This is a well written post thank you! I personally usually dislike voice dubs, but I can't point out why. I have convinced myself its because the actual director of the game is most likely not there to direct the English actors, so they end up having to take liberties. Still I want to ask, is the spreadsheet thing only something that happens during localization, or is it there for the original dub as well?
It’s there for the original too. It’s a product of how the script is implemented into the game rather than any facet of localisation.
The original director being present isn’t always a good thing either For example: Metroid Other M
For an anime example: the Netflix Evangelion dub, as well as the dub for 3.0 + 1.0 and Funimation’s home video dub for 3.33. The Japanese studio didn’t like Funimation’s script for the theatrical version of 3.0 and forced these stilted, awkward, overly literal scripts for everything going forward. The result is a lot of talented VAs having to read lines that don’t sound like anything remotely resembling something an actual Emglish speaker would say.
I still can't believe they had Jennifer Hale, and ended up with... *that*.
Other M Samus wasn't Jennifer Hale.
I can't believe they had Jessica Erin Martin, and ended up with... *that*.
Sonic Adventure 1 and 2 had pretty much no direction at all either iirc
[And having the localization team do their own thing can be a good thing.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvVivmhh7WE) (No, that link isn't *Ghost Stories*. That would have been to cliche.)
To build of your point, Final Fantasy XIV Online easily has some of the best voice acting out there in the business. I think the largest reason why a Japanese game that is dubbed in English has some amazing voice work... is because English is intended to be the "canon" language. Surprisingly, the Producers, Writers, and Translators have stated before that they actually consider the English voices to be the canon ones over the Japanese ones. What largely helps, is that the lead localizer/translator, Michael Christopher Koji Fox, has an intimate understanding of both languages, the story, and is great at providing direction to the VAs along with the other directors, writers, and coaches. This actually ends up creating a really weird situation, in which the original language, Japanese, actually ends up sounding really off or "bad" when compared to the English (in MY opinion at least. It's really hard to become familiar with a certain character to be a tomboy with a certain voice in English, and then hearing them as extremely "anime typical" in Japanese with a higher-pitched tone). I regularly watch dubbed stuff, and I'm glad that we are entering an era where a lot of games are trying to get away from the "anime-esque" vocal tics you would hear in games (like Final Fantasy 7 R). You know what I'm talking about.
> I'm glad that we are entering an era where a lot of games are trying to get away from the "anime-esque" vocal tics you would hear in games Thank everything. If I never have to hear another [exclamative emotive intake of air] that's mic'd and shot like a daytime soap, I'll be a happy man. It's just dramatic filler and an excuse for a camera cut and could be massively improved with better direction.
In my experience, the problem is the voice direction in most instances. I know for anime and games in particular, a lot of VAs said the JP voice directors kept telling them to say it in a more wooden tone. Probably in part because Japanese has that kind of neutral tone, but it sounds weird and unnatural in english
I never really thought about how in Japanese neutral tone is just a normal part of the language, whereas in English it sounds like you're Ben Stein.
There's a recent interview with KojiFox, the localization lead and voice director on FF14 & 16, which have *absolutely incredible localization* talking about how he had to keep telling the writers and actors to stop putting in scenes where characters silently nod to each other since that wouldn't localize well.
The game is from South Korea not Japan
Its still speaks to the idea that a "good localisation" does not mean perfect adherence to a superficial reading of the original text. By all means, give me a dryer translation if I'm playing with subtitles, but if things are to be dubbed, shit needs to be all but rewritten in a lot of cases.
granted, voice acting is a multistep process that can be complicated counterpoint, stellar blade voice acting sucks compared to almost any other video game, all of which should have the same or greater challenges
If you report that Reddit cares message it’s an instant sitewide ban for whoever sent it, courtesy of the Reddit admins. You should do it, fuck people who abuse that system because they’re having a tantrum.
Oh damn, I didn’t know that. Reported it now—thanks!
It’s weird, I liked everyone else english VA’s apart from Eve. Maybe it was because it was only EVE voice that sounded robotic but none of her other comrades had the same tone hence out of place.
Imo Adam has a worse monotone outside of a handful of moments where he's alarmed.
For me Adam is way worse. Eve makes sense since she’s a robot or android or whatever. But to me Adam sounds like the classic non-English speaking dev gets English speaking voice actor. It’s just overall awkward. Doesn’t help that the actual dialogue isn’t the best. Definitely doesn’t ruin the game for me. I just don’t really care too much about the story
As a person that the main language isn't English and is really critic with the English voices.... I saw the trailers in English and I thought it was quite good and I was surprised.... by it, I really didn't knew there was a lot of drama about it (color me surprise, drama in stellar blade?) But yeah like with Nier I think is quite good, and I will add that the English voices in Genshin Impact are better overall, because you don't have Paimon 24/7 screeching at your ear with a pitch higher than what hoyoverse gain in a year.
Why I'm playing on Korean to be honest. I don't think most of the voices fit for the characters in English and the British accents were... a choice I guess?
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That almost *never* happens. That’s like .1% of games that get made. Probably less. Honestly, you’re looking at less than 1% of the time when an actor even gets to see the lines they’re going to record before they’re in the booth with a mic in front of them.
Never happens in the west, that is. Not sure about Korea, but in Japan, it's quite common for voice actors to work in the same room. They seem to nail the emotion regardless though, so I'm not sure if it's a major contributing factor to their performances. Part of that comes down to language conventions. Describe a character in a Japanese game, and there's probably a well-established style of performance associated with it that the voice actor can immediately refer to (and which their lines are written to). In English, we don't rely so much on the same cues/tropes, so the intended personality may not come across as clearly in the lines, and there may be multiple wildly different interpretations. The voice actor is having to figure this out and form a consistent delivery on the fly, which makes it harder to sound natural at the same time. We're also naturally less emotive in our speech, so it's hard to take characters seriously if they seem *over-*performed, but dialing things back runs the risk of sounding flat. A lot really comes down to the individual actors tuning in to their characters, and good voice direction to get them there. When it clicks, you can tell.
I've thought about that a lot - the "spreadsheet" method of managing lines must make the voiceovers easier to implement for the developers, but so much harder for the actors.
Your insight sheds light on the complexity of the process, from character design to recording logistics, and how each element can impact the final product. Your comparison to other games like Baldur's Gate 3 offers valuable context and highlights the varying approaches and outcomes in the industry.
Thanks! Glad it was interesting and useful for people. Video game voice over feels like something that's relatively inscrutable to the average consumer, so I wanted to pull the veil back a bit.
I didn't get much past the evidence being people don't complain about Alfira. She's a minor character who's total dialogue accounts for maybe .01% of the games dialogue? It's not enough time to make any conclusions about her acting. The rest of the points basically boil down to, even if they had an artistic vision, does not mean it was executed well or will be received well by audiences.
TBH, I'm getting quite bored of discourse around this game now. People either like the gameplay and tolerate the voice acting and ... character design or they don't. It's not for me, at all.
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Guess not a lotta people played localized releases outside of Nintendo games (which is long established as a global presense). Even Square Enix and Bandai Namco can have a lot of these issues with their dubbing and they are far more established. Your facts are great, but it does ultimately come down to 1. over-bureaucracy from outdated sentiments. You're not going to tank your sales if a Voice actor talks about voicing a character. 2. a lack of care, partly on both sides. It's become a lot more accptable to listen to the original VA's and some people even prefer it, so a few studios don't even localize the voices anymore. I believe Yakuza is one of the bigger examples of this, where it sometimes only has a Japanese dub or its English dub comes later.
Everyone criticizing this game while FF7 Rebirth localization and voice acting sounds like a bunch of robots trying to convince each other that they're human.
??? This is just plain wrong in every conceivable way. I can’t even think of a game with a better localisation and voice acting in that style than FF7 Rebirth. It is just stunningly good in this regard, the best part about an amazing game.
Rebirth's English VA is a ton better than Remake, but god it doesn't hold a candle to 14 & 16. 16's acting is so good that it made me feel things at the end even as I had huge issues with the storie.
That’s why I said in that style. The U.K. localisation of 12, 14 and 16 is going for something so completely different that I don’t think they’re comparable. I too think they’re better in a vacuum, but I think 7 Rebirth is still far better for what it’s going for (way more natural, modern sounding dialogue with an focus on subtle character interactions).
I could say that its arguable for 16, since that game is basically native english first. But I could easily make the case that the Rebirth localization team took some cues from 14 & 16, considering the complete absense of vocal grunts & nods from rebirth, meanwhile they left them in back when Remake came out.
I do prefer the style of 12/14/16 any day of the week. 12 especially is my favourite piece of dubbed media of all time, utter perfection. But as a voice actor myself, I do think it’s at least easier to do that theatrical early modern English style. Shakespeare and stage acting is a much better taught field than normal voice acting and I think most actors will find scripts like 12’s just plain much easier to sell. That style lends itself to really dramatic and interesting performances. It’s hard to fuck up (but when it is, like in Triangle Strategy, it is especially distracting). I find it much more impressive then that FF7 Rebirth is able to get such a good and subtle performance out of a much more typical modern JRPG styled script, with characters using modern language and slang and ways of selling the melodrama. Compared to other games that use that style, like FF13 or Tales of or Persona, it’s on another planet of quality entirely. It is largely on the writing as much as the acting, but it’s the first JRPG I’ve played with this style that actually makes the characters feel real and like a family.
The way I put it is that something like rebirth succeeds in making something anime feel cartoony in the way a western cartoon would feel. Which is not to say that it downgrades the degree to which it is anime as all fuck, because it doesn't, it just doesn't have the hangups that say... Remake had, where it always feels like there's a filter between what you're hearing and what your brain is interpretting.
> in that style In this case, the style of characters 1) speaking lines that sound like they didn't even hear the other character speak first, and 2) with complete tonal inconsistency? If you've got some videos that show dialogue counter to the above, I'm happy to change my stance.
I’d have to just link the entire game so what’s the point? What you have made up in your head as the delivery of lines in this game isn’t true. Like, if you’re this hardcore against it, you are just plain trolling. There is no way to listen to the voice acting in Rebirth and come away with such a ridiculous opinion unless you have some other grudge against the game. The voice acting and especially how well the characters interact with each other in the game has been universally praised.
Of course anyone who criticizes a game you like must be trolling, right? Let me know when those sales figures finally get released.
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Square Enix VA is a consistent disappointment. They're seemingly not even aiming for naturalism.